Domineering is a game played on subsets of the square lattice by two players, who alternately remove connected two-square regions (dominoes) from play. Left may only place dominoes vertically; Right must play horizontally. The normal win-condition applies, so that the first player unable to move loses.

It is difficult to analyse general Domineering positions, even for quite small boards. One way to gain insight into the nature of the problem is to watch actual games between expert players. To determine who were the strongest players available, an open-registration tournament was held. To insure that the players gave proper consideration to their play, a prize of $500 was awarded the winner.

The finalists were Dan Calistrate of Calgary and David Wolfe of Berkeley. The format for the final was to play two games, each player taking the first turn once; if the series was split, two more games would be played, and so on until one player won both games of a round. As in chess, it would be expected that one set of pieces would provide an advantage, therefore winning with the favoured set would be like holding serve in tennis. In the event, the first round produced two first-player wins, and Calistrate won both second-round games.